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We tempted fate at ICANN. A few of us were chatting about how we haven’t had a spec update in months.

Naturally we all came home and something came up.

We’ve always known that detecting conflicts in TXT records was a bit optimistic. The specification had indicated that adding a TXT record should not detect conflicts with existing TXT records. But we got some feedback that this behavior wasn’t always desired.

As such, we’ve added some simple rules around how conflicts in TXT records should be seen. There are three possible settings for a new value called “txtConflictMatchingMode” as an attribute of a TXT record in a template.

None: This is the default value, and is the existing behavior. With this setting, a template would behave as it always has.

All: This value indicates that existing values should be detected as conflicts.

Prefix: This value indicates that existing values with the same prefix (specified in another attribute txtConfictMatchingPrefix).

Domain Connect has been around for a couple of years, but we had a coming out part at ICANN in Barcelona during the week of October 21st 2018.

Several DNS Providers (1&1 and GoDaddy) along with Service Providers (Google, Microsoft, and WPEngine) were present. We were also had help from Hubspot and from the Domain Name Association (DNA).

Our goal was to make sure people knew what Domain Connect was and how it helps the industry. To that end the event was highly successful. The most common reaction was “this makes a ton of sense”. We shared several case studies (links will be shared from here in the next couple of weeks) outlining the benefits to Service Providers, DNS Providers, and of course Consumers.